@bostonglobe A Guatemalan immigrant with no Massachusetts criminal record was arrested Monday in New Bedford after federal agents shattered the glass on his vehicle as he and his wife waited inside the car for their lawyer to arrive. Juan Francisco Méndez, 29, who was taken to an undisclosed location, has been in the United States for two years and was undocumented, but pursuing an adjustment of his immigration status, according to his attorney, Ondine Gálvez. The tense standoff took about 30 minutes. The couple were taken from their car after an agent smashed in the rear right window. Click on the link in our bio to read more. This story and video originally appeared in The New Bedford Light, @thenewbedfordlight, a nonprofit digital news outlet that covers the South Coast. ♬ original sound – The Boston Globe
Kristallnacht and the Nazi sledgehammer
Kristallnacht-Night of Broken Glass (November 9, 1938) = Trump-Years of Broken Glass (2024-2028)
Kristallnacht saw the trashing of Jewish businesses, burning of books and synagogues, and vicious assaults against German Jews. Only the year before, Adolf Eichmann had visited Palestine to explore the viability of expelling European Jewry there. By 1942, Hitler abandoned the policy of voluntary migration or forced deportations in favor of mass extermination: the Final Solution to the “Jewish problem.”
His hatred of the Jews was not just based on firmly-held beliefs, it served a political purpose as well: it offered Germans an enemy, the hatred of whom united them. Once united, Hitler could recruit the nation to support his grand plans to conquer all of Europe.
The only difference between Nazi Germany and Trump’s America, is that we have a long history of democracy and a constitutional system. They were created as a bulwark against potential tyranny. There is still a resistance to Trump’s sledgehammer. But he is rapidly smashing the very foundations of the nation.
Today, Donald Trump uses the same hatred to mobilize his base. In persuading Americans that immigrants are actually at war with America, he can not only justify emergency powers not used since the Japanese internment; he can then proceed with his greater plan to wield the hammer against the federal government, the universities, the courts, and American democracy in order to reshape it in his fascist image. This gives him absolute, dictatorial power just as Hitler assumed in the years after the 1933 election. Just as Kristallnacht led inexorably to the Final Solution, Trump will inflict four years of broken glass on this nation, after which it can never be the same.
Trump ships legal immigrants in the dead of night to El Salvador concentration camps. His ICE foot-soldiers in hoods and masks (see video above) smash car windows and drag innocent people by their hair and disappear them into a hellish system reminiscent of the court in Kafka’s The Trial. They disappear the kidnap victims to concentration camps, otherwise known as prisons. Once locked up, they are denied their rights, abused, and held indefinitely without charge or access to a lawyer. They cannot appeal their arrest.
The Nazis similarly hunted down Jews and crammed them into cattle cars. They expelled them from the homes and nations where they’ve lived for generations. Then they shipped them to extermination camps in which they murdered them en masse. That hasn’t yet come to pass during the Trump administration.
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ICE victims have a travel “upgrade.” No cattle cars. Instead, they’re loaded in chains on a plane and disappear into CECOT, the Salvadoran prison. Trump washes his hands of them. Once they leave our shores he refuses any responsibility for their fate or their rights. He defies the courts to do anything about it. He despises the very principles upon the nation was founded and which led to its greatness. He tears up the Constitution, even plans to deport “homegrown” US citizens. He further plans to expel millions of such refugees and immigrants whom he deems criminals, rapists, parasites, all-around undesirables.
All that’s lacking is a Final Solution to America’s problems. Mass arrests, ransacking and burning offices of humanitarian NGOs. ICE Brownshirts engaged in their own American Kristallnacht, taking sledgehammers to immigrant businesses, stripping rights and property from victims. Even murder.
It could happen here. We’ve seen it before. Will we permit it again?
